Robert Schultz, PhD

Robert Schultz’s PhD training focused on clinical psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including use of brain MRI for my PhD thesis. During a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale University, he expanded his expertise in neuroimaging methods, including sMRI, fMRI, DTI, magnetization transfer, as well as data processing and statistical modeling. He joined the Yale faculty in 1994, where my research focused on developmental disabilities, primarily autism, with an emphasis on social behavior using fMRI, eye-tracking, and cognitive and neuropsychological methods. He also gained experience studying intellectual disability, Tourette syndrome, OCD, ADHD, Prader-Willi Syndrome and Williams Syndrome.

In 2007, he moved to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania to establish the Center for Autism Research (CAR). CAR has grown to include approximately 25 doctoral-level faculty and research scientists across Psychology, Psychiatry and Pediatrics. The program focuses on clinical translational science, biomarker development and validation, parsing autism heterogeneity, early screening and diagnosis, and outcome measurement.

In addition to directing CAR, he has held leadership roles within the autism research community, including serving as president of the International Society for Autism Research. He currently co-directs the CHOP-Penn Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC).

His current research mostly focuses on the development of AI-based methods to quantify behaviors such as social reciprocity, eye gaze, imitation and gait, in collaboration with colleagues in engineering, computer science, and linguistics. They create brief, sensitive digital phenotyping tools that directly measures behavior at a granular level for use as early detection biomarkers and granular outcome measures for use in clinical trials, where demonstrating even small improvements is essential.